She loved London. It had taken her all of ten sleepy minutes sitting in the concourse of Euston station to discover this. Fresh from the Holyhead train, a paper cup of coffee in hand, her rucksack at her feet, she’d looked at the rush of commuters and thought, This is the place for me. Every day brought something new to amuse or intrigue: the beauty of the Georgian terraces, the dusty tang of the Underground, the stalls that sold exotic fruits, like watermelon and cherries, wine at two pounds a bottle, women in saris and salwar kameez … and the heat. Why had nobody told her about the heat? She’d assumed, with England being so close to Ireland, that the weather would be similar. Yet even on damp days, the city had a gorgeous soupy warmth. And still people complained. It was too humid, they’d moan. Tess told them that a week in Kilmitten might change their minds. ‘Where I’m from,’ she’d say, ‘it’s always windy. Even on the best day of the year, a sudden gust could slice you in two.’

Londoners, she was discovering, were partial to a good moan. If it wasn’t the weather, it was the Tube. If it wasn’t Margaret Thatcher, it was the price of property. ‘It’s all great,’ Tess liked to say. Her colleagues would sigh and give her a look that said, ‘You’ll learn.’

She’d always wanted to go to London. In her early teens, she’d spent hours in the Templemorris library, poring over old copies of the NME. It wasn’t the music that interested her so much as the characters, the venues, the fashions. She would read about the Brixton Academy or the Hammersmith Palais, and dream that one day life would take her to such places.

So far, the city hadn’t let her down. Even simple things, like walking down the street, watching the hordes streaming past and wondering at their stories, gave her joy. Nobody knew who she was or where she came from, and that suited her just fine. There was scant chance of anyone wrinkling their nose and saying, ‘Kilmitten? Isn’t that the place where . .?’

In the years since Father Galvin’s death, they’d all grown used to it. ‘Yes,’ they’d say, ‘that’s where the priest was killed and, no, they never caught anyone.’

However awkward this was for Tess, it was miserable for Tom. At college, he said, everybody had asked, and eventually he’d told the truth: it had happened in his house. Some people were content to leave it at that; more were brazen enough to question him. Who do you think did it? they’d ask. In the end, he looked an interrogator in the eye and said, ‘Professor Plum in the library with the lead piping.’ After that, they left him in peace.